Income Report Q1 2025: We Made $22,598 In 3 Months While TRAVELLING

Our Salt and Charcoal Travel business made $22,598.86 between January and March 2025 – the first quarter of the year. 

That’s $7,532 a month made while… TRAVELLING! 

So, let’s break down how we earned this. The income came from two sources:

• This travel blog (affiliate sales). We had a 48% drop in earnings compared to last quarter.
• Instagram (brand deals). We had an 83% increase in earnings.

The drop in earnings stings quite a bit, but we’ll explain why this happened further down, as well as the steps we’re taking to fix this. 

We’re also sharing a few things we wished we know when we started doing brand deals on Instagram!

But the reason we are sharing this isn’t to brag, it’s simply to show you it IS possible to earn for travel, and while travelling. Also its a way to keep ourselves accountable and track our progress.

Some key things to know before moving on:

• This blog started mid-2021, but we weren’t consistent with it until late 2022. At the time of writing we have ~200 blogs published.
• In blogging, how much you earn is directly related to the work you’ve done in the past. Your first blog posts won’t make much money, but it’s a snowball effect – the more helpful posts you publish, the better.
• We have experience monetising websites, we’re trained and have been working on websites since 2016, so this is far from our first rodeo. We learnt how to do it here. 
• We want to show you that anyone can do this. If an ex-FIFO (Chris) and a social worker (Bec) can do this, so can you!
• This report might get a bit technical. We’ve done our best to explain the concepts but feel free to send us an email with any questions!
• This is our third income report. Here are all our previous ones.

And finally, REMEMBER – the more people you help, the more money you make.

With that in mind, let’s talk NUMBERS!

Travel blog (affiliate income): $2,241

“Affiliate marketing” is an income form where someone promotes a product/service on behalf of a company. 

If people buy it through their link, the promoter earns a commission at no extra cost to the customer. 

We use affiliate marketing to earn money with:

• Tours and experiences we recommend in our blog posts, with providers like Viator or Get Your Guide.
• General products we use and recommend, like Caravan RV for purchasing bus parts and equipment, or eSims from Airalo.
• Things we think might help people in their travels – travel insurance, caravan rentals, etc.

The cool thing about this is we genuinely recommend them, and use them ourselves too! 

So it’s a win-win – we are not ripping anyone off at the end of the day. We are just leading customers to make a sale they were possibly looking for anyway.

But if you’re just getting started with affiliate marketing, you’ll quickly learn that your income won’t always go up in a straight line!

We had a pretty noticeable dip from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025 – from $4,216.41 down to $2,241.85. 

That’s almost a 50% drop, and yeah, it stings a bit! 

But we want to show you exactly what happened, how we worked through it, and what steps we’re taking next. So that if this ever happens to you, you’ll know how to handle it too!

Why our affiliate income dropped 48% from Q4 to Q1

1) Affiliate programs performed worse

Most of our income came from two programs:

• Viator. This is a marketplace for tours, where tour operators all over the world list their tours here to reach a wider audience.
• Commission Factory. This is an affiliate network, i.e. they connect you to dozens of brands with affiliate programs, so you can earn commissions from promoting their products/services. 

Both incomes dropped in Q1 vs Q4.

Viator earnings dropped 26.6% compared to the previous period: 

And Commission Factory earnings dropped 13.21%:

So, even before looking at anything else, we can see that the programs we rely on just didn’t perform as well.

Now, you can see that the overall clicks also dropped in both of them. That’s probably one of the main reasons why the income dropped so much.  

Clicks are usually related to traffic. Theoretically, the more traffic, the more clicks. 

So, let’s look at traffic!

2) The type of traffic matters

You might think, “maybe you got less traffic?”, and you’d be right! 

We had a 5.2% drop in traffic compared to the previous quarter:

Why? First of all, Q4 is naturally a stronger season when it comes to traffic. During holidays, people are booking travel, buying gifts, and generally spending more.

So Q1 is a slower time. Many folks are recovering from the holidays, not planning big purchases or trips. 

So even if nothing changed on your site, you’d likely still see a dip from December to January.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. See, not all traffic is created equal!

After a deeper analysis, we found out our organic traffic dropped by 10.63%

Organic traffic = people that find us from Google search.

That’s the kind of traffic that usually brings in the most affiliate income for us. So if we’re getting less people from Google, it makes sense that we had less clicks, thus less affiliate income. 

3) We also lost a key article in the rankings

This was probably the biggest blow. 

One of our top-performing affiliate articles lost its position in Google. That means that when people are searching for that, our article is not showing up to help them out anymore. 

This is a common problem, but we need to figure out why this happened so we can take measures.

And after a deep analysis, we found out this is because Google itself changed the results of that particular search. 

It’s nothing to do with us (or other travel blogs who also lost their rankings). It’s just that Google decided to remove all blogs altogether from that specific search.

We have zero control over that. It happens! 

The search results (called SERPs) are always changing, and sometimes your content gets pushed down or removed completely from certain rankings. 

It SUUUCKS, but it’s part of the job. What can you do? Adapt and find new ways to get traffic… which is exactly what we’re doing.

Here’s what we’re doing to fix this

We’re not just sitting on our hands (and neither should you if this happens!).

Allow yourself to panic for a bit, let all that frustration out of your system. Then, figure out what to do next.

We’re doing a few things: 

• Doubling down on social traffic to reach new people and reclaim some of the lost affiliate clicks.
• Updating old articles to make sure they’re super helpful, up-to-date, and competitive, 
• Keeping an eye on what content is ranking well now, and adjusting our future content to match what’s working.

Affiliate income going up and down is completely normal. You’ll have strong months and slow months. 

What matters most is understanding why it happens, so you don’t panic and start changing everything blindly.

Start by checking which programs dropped in performance? Did your traffic change, or did the type of traffic change? Are your top posts still visible in Google? Was it a seasonal dip? What can you try next?

This is just part of the journey. Keep learning, keep testing, and most importantly, keep showing up!

Instagram (brand deals): $20,357.01

These are the paid gigs we’ve done for brands thanks to our Instagram presence. 

Sadly, for privacy reasons, we can’t disclose the exact projects or brands. But we can share our earnings: $20,357.01

Now, these paid gigs focus mostly on creating content via short videos or photography for brands’ usage on our Instagram, or UGC content they can use for their accounts.

Here’s an example. You’ll notice it says stuff like “ad”, “paid partnership”, etc early in the caption:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Chris & Bec | Adventure Travel (@salt.and.charcoal)

This brings up a crucial point – ALWAYS work with brands you know and love.

We’ve been using DJI drones since WAY before we knew there would ever be a partnership. We love the product, which is why it was a no-brainer for us to promote!

See, if you want to build or grow your business with Instagram, know that brands will eventually reach out to you… Even if you only have a few thousand followers.

3 Things we wish we knew earlier about Instagram brand deals

1) Know your worth

Early on, we did a lot of exchange deals. This is where you receive a product/service and promote it on your Instagram, but don’t get paid. 

This is a great way to grow a portfolio early on. But as you start to get better at content creation, CHARGE for your services!

Even if you are only reaching a few thousand views, that’s THOUSANDS of potential paying customers for that product/service! 

Plus the hours of work behind the scenes you have put in to create said content.

2) Test the product/service before promoting it

If it’s stuff you haven’t tried and it ends up being average, you risk damaging your reputation and the hard work you’ve put into your Instagram, only for a few bucks.

No amount of money is worth losing what you have worked to create. 

So we recommend focusing on promoting products that you personally use and that you believe in. Your audience trusts you, don’t take that for granted!

3) Be picky with who you work with

Some random, obscure brands might offer you payment in exchange for you promoting their products to your audience. 

It can be tempting to say yes, but please be careful! 

Apart from knowing the product/service, make sure it aligns with your brand.

For example, sometimes we get offers from gambling apps and alcohol brands. These are products that don’t align with Salt and Charcoal as a brand, so we say no.

Let us know if you’re interested in learning HOW we monetised our Instagram:

Getting paid

The problem with working with different affiliate programs, clients, etc, is that payment comes in different currencies – AUD, USD, EUR, GBP, etc.

As a travel blogger, you need somewhere you can receive all these payments without the hefty conversion fees of most banks.

Paypal is not a great option – their commissions are ridiculously high and seriously eat up your revenue. Plus we have been scammed too many times there.

That’s why we use Wise. You can receive money and make payments from dozens of currencies, plus transfer them to other bank accounts.  

And their conversion rates are unparalleled – they’re some of the lowest in the market. And the whole thing is so easy to use that even my grandma could do it!

You can also have a debit card with them free of charge to pay internationally while you travel. Talk about a win-win!

Check out Wise here to see if it’s right for you.

(You betcha that’s an affiliate link! But we actually USE and LOVE Wise so are happy to recommend it to you!)

Want to follow in our footsteps?

We learnt how to make money off websites (like this travel blog) from the eBusiness Institute back in 2016, with their course called “Digital Investors”. 

The founders of the institute (Matt and Lizz Raad, a couple from Brissy) created this course for beginners to teach how to buy and renovate websites for passive income and profit.

Since we did the course, we’ve built, renovated, and sold several websites – one for $250,000 and our last website sale was for $76,000. 

We’ve also kept a few websites (like this one) because it makes monthly revenue, and we’re passionate about it!

Honestly, we cannot thank these guys enough, our life has changed exponentially since learning from them! We are still good friends with them to this day. 

And yes, we are their affiliate too. But, once again, because we genuinely recommend them to learn how to earn money online. 

We trust these guys. We wouldn’t be here without them!

They’re offering a FREE masterclass exclusively for Salt and Charcoal readers! It includes several bonuses at the end. Watch it here:

The webinar goes over how we earn money online for our travels and enough to save for the future too.

They also have other courses. We have done all of them and reviewed them in this blog, check it out to find out if the eBusiness Institute is the right fit for you.

Want more income reports? Here are all of them: